I posted the following in the Kindle forum, thinking some Kindle users might be able to help me out. So far I have received no responses, so I am reposting this here:

I expect my new Kindle 2 to arrive in the next day or so, and in anticipation I have been prepping some PDF files that I un-DRM'd so that they can be popped onto my Kindle. I am using Calibre to convert from PDF to Mobi, but I am struggling to get the resulting Mobi file to look decent.

It seems that no matter what I do with the conversion settings, I can't make things look right. I know PDF conversion is kinda poor, but there has to be something I am missing. Thanks!

PDF conversion is pretty tough, so you might not be anything you are missing.

I know the Calibre devs are working on an improved PDF conversion engine (not sure when), but really, the best results I've gotten in the meantime is to export a PDF to HTML, edit that, then convert to whatever in Calibre.

There is no need to convert PDF since you can now read them on the Kindle 2...

You must have way better vision than I do, because the type is way too small for me to read on the 4 or 5 books I've copied over to try. I'll continue to convert them to mobi to read, even though there isn’t anything around that does a decent job of it.

You must have way better vision than I do, because the type is way too small for me to read on the 4 or 5 books I've copied over to try. I'll continue to convert them to mobi to read, even though there isn’t anything around that does a decent job of it.

Maybe. I tend to keep my reader on the smallest font size. When I had to convert them I used Adobe Acrobat (not reader) and saved it as html, then used the html in Calibre to make my mobi. Was not the best but it was good enough

Interesting idea. I do have Acrobat, so I can give that a shot tonight to see how that goes. I was also following the discussion about scientific articles converting incorrectly, so this might be a way for me to get those articles in a readable format on my Kindle.

I do love that there is now native PDF support, but on that tiny screen the font will be too small indeed! Here's hoping for a zoom button...

I've found that even Adobe Acrobat (not the reader) doesn't do a very good job of converting. I still get many paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences, inconsistent indents, etc. All of which spoil the "reading experience" for me.